UCaaS+CCaaS: A match made in heaven
Chaitanya Chokkareddy
Sep 1, 2023
India has one of the highest penetrations of mobile users. We can say, in fact, that India skipped the landline revolution and jumped directly to the mobile revolution.
One of the victims of this unexpected shift was the ubiquitous desk phone. The phone that you find in every office in the United States. In India, desk phones are a rare sight. The effect of this is starkly visible in the UCaaS industry. For the UCaaS industry in the US, everything starts with the desk phone. But since the desk phone is non-existent in India, the UCaaS industry failed to take off. India is not tapping into the $50 billion UCaaS industry.
But India is the back office of the world. So, contact centers have a major presence. As home to millions of contact center agents and thousands of processes, the CCaaS industry has truly taken off in India. But the CCaaS industry is also pretty strong in the US, with leading players competing for mindshare.
UCaaS+CCaaS
Before we can see how UCaaS and CCaaS can work together let’s understand what each solution contributes individually.
In a nutshell, UCaaS deals with collaboration tools at an internal level. It deals with internal communication. CCaaS, on the other hand, deals with external communication. Customers reaching out to your business will first touch base with your CCaaS.
So, if UCaaS and CCaaS serve different purposes, then, why do we need to make them work together?
The whole purpose of using communications software is to reduce friction and make the communication process seamless. By integrating CCaaS with UCaaS we can strengthen internal office and contact center collaboration.
Consider the following scenario:
Let’s say a customer calls in with a query. The call lands on your CCaaS which then routes to the right agent. The agent has been trained to answer most queries. But let’s assume that this particular query cannot be handled by this agent immediately, and he needs help from a colleague who is not a call center agent. In the current scenario, the agent logs the ticket and forwards it to the internal employee. The agent will then inform the customer that the ticket is logged and that they will get back soon.
This leads to unnecessary delays.
With the right UCaaS+CCaaS integration, the flow can be much more seamless. For that particular call, the agent can seamlessly search for an employee who can answer in the company directory, see the presence of the employee to see if he is available to answer, and then immediately transfer the customer to the employee for a quick first call resolution.
The integration can work in the other direction too. Let’s say a customer calls a salesperson with a query. The salesperson receives the call on the UCaaS, but since it is a support query, the salesperson can check for agents(within the CCaaS) trained to respond to this query and, if they’re available, seamlessly transfer this call to them on the tech support number (which is on CCaaS).
Finally, the biggest advantage for businesses is having all their communication data under one roof for easy accounting and auditing.
Conclusion
It is because of these tremendous advantages that UCaaS+CCaaS is touted as the next big thing in communications- ushering consolidation season within the communication space.
We have all heard how Zoom was trying to acquire Five9 for $15 billion. Every UCaaS player is trying to find the right CCaaS partner. But most of them are just trying to integrate at a sales level. They are looking at adding CCaaS licenses as upselling.
But for the integration to work, it’s not just about upselling. It’s about finding the right feature set and seamless integration.
Eventually, what matters is that employees should not feel as if they are working with two disparate systems.
